Sinking of U-8

On 4 March 1915 in the Strait of Dover destroyers of the British Dover Patrol hunted down and destroyed the German submarine U-8. Her entire crew of 29 men were taken prisoner. The British chronology of the war records this day as the first case in which indicator nets helped to destroy a U-boat.

Nets in the strait

Indicator nets, light nets of thin steel wire suspended from floats, were not meant to stop submarines but to betray their presence. On 7 January 1915 the Admiralty decided to allocate fishing vessels for laying them to several bases, including Dover, and from mid-January the nets were tested in the strait. The commander of the Dover Patrol, Rear-Admiral Horace Hood, based on them his defence of the passage from the North Sea to the English Channel. In February drifters also began laying such nets in the North Channel.

The beginnings were difficult. The nets tore in gales, good buoys were lacking, and the drifters had no way of quickly alerting the destroyers. On 2 March a submarine probably broke and dragged away one drifter’s nets, but by the time a destroyer understood the fishermen’s signals it was too late for a pursuit. Admiral Hood decided to equip all the drifters with signal rockets.

The chase

U-8, under Kapitänleutnant Alfred Stoß, was an experienced boat. At the end of February, after the German war zone came into force, she had sunk five British ships in the English Channel. On 4 March she left the Flanders coast on another patrol.

According to the British Naval Staff monograph, shortly after noon a submarine was seen surfacing from the destroyer Viking, commanded by Commander Edward Evans, a member of Robert Scott’s Antarctic expedition. The U-boat dived at once. At about the same time the crew of the drifter Roburn noticed strange movements of their net floats a few miles north-east of the Varne buoy. The commander of the destroyer flotilla, Captain C. D. Johnson, came out of Dover in the destroyer Maori and called a dozen or so ships to the area. After 2 p.m. a net buoy was seen from the destroyer Kangaroo moving rapidly through the water.

At about 3.20 p.m. a periscope was sighted from Maori. Johnson ordered the destroyer Ghurka to stream a so-called modified sweep, a towed line with explosive charges, and drag it across the submarine’s course. The periscope appeared several more times. At about 5 p.m. Ghurka fired the charges. A moment later U-8 broke the surface at a steep angle. The destroyers fired several rounds at the conning tower, and sailors came out of the hatch with their hands raised. The damaged boat sank a few minutes later, despite an attempt by the destroyer Ure to take her in tow. The British rescued four officers and 25 men, practically unhurt.

The nets’ achievement?

Admiral Hood was not convinced that the nets had contributed to the destruction of U-8. The main instrument had been the modified sweep, which then scored its first success. The Admiralty nevertheless agreed to pay a reward of £500 to the drifter crews, because Hood wanted to keep up the spirits of the fishermen, who were discouraged by the lack of results from their work. In 2016 the wreck of U-8, lying near the Varne Bank, was given legal protection in the United Kingdom.

The prisoners were marched through the streets of Dover to the castle, and then taken to detention at Chatham. The Admiralty did not regard sinking merchant ships without warning as a legitimate method of war and intended to try U-boat crews for piracy. Crews captured after 18 February were therefore kept apart from other prisoners of war. The Germans responded with reprisals: 39 British officers in German captivity were placed in solitary confinement. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was still defending this policy in the House of Commons at the end of April, but on 9 June 1915 his successor, Arthur Balfour, announced that prisoners from submarines would be treated exactly the same as the rest.